1
BEING IN A STATE
In the play “Saved”five working class young men stone to death a baby in a pram. Why? I saw a rehearsal of the play in a working class suburb in Paris. The men moved like primates, hunched shoulders, bentknees, hands held as if they habitually walked on their knuckles. They grunted and howled. I asked all the actors not just those in that scene but in the whole play to stand in a semi-circle so that they could look into the pram and see the baby. I said when scream sconce when I say scream and then be silent. They did that. I said what are you screaming at? They said the baby. After five or six seconds of silence I said “Scream again once when I say scream and then be silent.”They did – and so on. Their scream changed. Sometimes it was full of rage, or still loud but strangely lonely, or military, or calling for help. I made some of the silences longer. The actors were perplexed – what did I want of them. They had begun listening to their own screams. They were screaming to themselves, asking themselves not what did I want but what did they want. How long did this last? Over half an hour. Three quarters of an hour? I didn’t notice. Again I said scream. Silence. What are you screaming at? And an actress said “Myself.”
Of course.
I dont know of any baby being stoned to death in a London park. The play is not documentary, it is a drama. First I shall look at drama abstractly and then illustrate it by the play. Drama unravels the paradoxes of human reality and then uses what it unravels to recreate a new reality. Of course it does this only within the limitations of fiction. But what is changed is not mere daily reality, as it would be changed if you had seen a stoning in a park and intervened to stop it. That would be an isolated event. Drama is more profound. It creates a new idea. Ideas change culturesand behaviour. Unlike science, drama does not reveal what is already there. It takes the elements of an event and reuses them in a new structure to change their effect. This changes their meaning, it changes the behaviour within aculture and so itchanges reality. Theatre has to do with acting, with imitation of reality. But drama is not theatre. Drama has to do with enacting.It releases whatever is “bound” into some inhuman event (such as an infanticide), and frees it to express its humanness. What is “bound” in an event (whether humane or inhumane) is human energy related to an idea, to meaning. In an act such as infanticide the dehumanising idea is Ideological, part of a society’s dominating culture. But the dehumanising can have asocially effect only if it is a purposeful cultural distortionof humanness. That is the trap and the bait. The bait is that it enables the existing society to function (however imperfectly), the trap is that it degrades the self. Ideology is itself a form of drama. Ideology turns reality into fiction, drama turns fiction into reality. Ideology establishes law and order. The order doesnt just enable society to (imperfectly) function, it uses the disorder it provokes as itself another reason to impose its order. Thissleight-of-mind is not necessarilycynical,at its most insidious (as in Thatcherism) it is self-righteous. Authority as the guardian of ideologysustains itself bymoney, which is the source of power. But it may also sustain and justify itself by extreme asceticism and humility. This is so with religious authority. But beyond religious love, beyond any form of ideological honour, there must always be a withering hatred – that is part of the dynamic of drama.
Ideology and drama both use the same psychological resources and human energy. When Ideologybinds these things together in an inhuman meaning, formal drama can createeventsthat release them to become their human opposite. It follows that the process must be logical and so to understand ourselves we must understand the logic of drama and even the logic of imagination. Usually we do not understand the logic of these things, we think of them as fanciful or wish-fulfilling and not as logic. Elsewhere I have described the origin in the new born child (the neonate) of the imperative to be human. We are born human but not with the imperative to be human. That is an act of mind. It originates in the new born infant (the neonate) when it isfaced with its situation in the world of time, space and things. This changes the neonate into the neonate-monad. This follows from the way we enter the geometry, geography and timeof the world -- we create our “self” by entering reality. The self can exist only in a site and therefore in a situation. Together the site and the situation create the self and its human Being. Clearly these are the elements of drama and this makes us the dramatic species. When the neonate-monad creates itself it creates drama. This leads to our radical innocence. This innocence lies in the objectivity of thesituation, it becomes psychological only when the self is able to express its will. The initial objectivity of its innocence makes it innate. Later, because the self is a form of drama, it may be corrupted by Ideology –as if the socialisedsite became the plot that corrupts the self. Nevertheless, since radical innocence is ineradicable, it will still lour and glimmer behind the corruption. This is the source of the paradoxes and ambiguities of humanness and its drama. Religious ideology regards radical innocence as original sin. The Ideology of socio-biology regards it as necessary human violence. Ideology must found its distortions in truth if they are to convince and seem plausible. Ideology is itselfa distorted form of drama, and in order to remove autonomy and power from the self and transfer it to authority, it must, following the logic of drama, reverse the meaning of reality: it corrupts the radical innocence of the self and in its place puts the law-and-order of unjust society. Drama uses the means the self originally uses to create itself and ideology corrupts these means in order to administer society.
In a word, drama enacts the logic of humanness. In any drama there are three “brains”: the first brain isthe cast of actors, the second brain is the audience,thethird brain is the stage itself. The three brains repeat the initial creation of the self and in drama they become one, just as initially the self and its situation are one.The actor and the audience are in the place of the self, the stage is in the place of the site.They become one in the meaning of the situation. Drama reproduces the imperative to be human. Theadult drama’s events are extreme and return the audience brain to the degree ofemergency in which the neonate,the new born infant, created a self in its situation in its world.The infant’s situation was existentially troubled andontologically harrowing. The infant is not yetIdeologised and this is the ground of human freedom. It is the foundation the self gives itself, it is its radical innocence. Radical innocence is not naive,itsultimate expression is inthe implacability of the Tragic, when it chooses to be human in the face of authority and the administration of Ideological law-and-order. In the infant radical innocence is the imperative to be human. Its three-fold nature (the three brains of drama) makes it personal and social. In the adult it is the imperative to justice. Because we are the dramatic species we are also the political species. Drama has two basic purposes: one is the understanding of justice and the creation of a just society. Against this,Ideology sees us as a species with its feet chained to the ground that survives by scavenging on the moon. This is an image of Ideology – we are chained in both place, the struggle to be free from one makes us captive of the other. Shakespeare said appropriately for his time “to be or not to be, that is the question.” We have to say “to be mad or not to be mad, that is the question, and if to be mad then all that follows.” That is the question for our time.
The dramatic dynamic should not be confused with Freudianism. That seeks to reduce us to the biological and precedes humanness and human self-creativity. Inevitablyit led tothe doctrine of Thanatos, Freud’s death wish, which is not tragic but culturally weary, forlorn and grotesque. The other interpretation of our nature prevalent in our time is scientific. Increasingly this is connected to technology to produce the journalistic interpretation of us as pre-human things thatsoonwill be made orderly by being fitted with gadgets. Ideology pounces eagerly on these things because they debase and weaken humanness. Humanness’s only defence against them is drama and its logic.
I describe the nature of modern drama inorder to show that there is an alternative to the present theatre of entertainment. All structures that have to do with human reality participate in one another. The economy, politics, bureaucracy, technology, ideology, culture, society all inter-relate, change and modify each other. They do this using the abilities and capacities of human Being, which are (so to say) their raw material. Historically they are assembled under the authority of Ideology, which gets its power by isolating them from each other so that their human purpose is lost in a disguised efficiency. The purpose of drama is the veracity of humanness, the purpose of ideology is injustice. The situation would still be the same even if human motives were unconscious, because what is determinant is what we consciously make of these things, even of the unconscious. Ultimately our species is driven by its imperative to be human, to introduce the purposes of morality into society in an indifferent, mechanical universe, and historically to survive scarcity and natural danger. To succeed, it is not enough that humanness be created in the self, it must be created in the site – that is, we must create the meaning of humanness, which is justice, in society. Because allthe inter-relations between the various constituents of humanness, some of which I have listed, are mediated through the human self, they develop through drama and its logic either in formal, staged drama or its practical presence in the social inter-relations. This creates the paradoxes of morality. Morality is constant in the human species as the good and the bad, buthistorically it isconstantly redefined, often in what to a later age seems an alarming history. Historically, too, social morality must be immoral. This is so even if only because the administration of society lags behind the possibilities of its culture. Ideology and itsadministration hinder culture, its justice is unjust and its riches create poverty. To see the perversity of its contrivances, consider this: In its earlyincipient rites of sacrifice the animal had to be pure and spotless, and the victim of human sacrifice had to be pure and innocent and therefore fitted, in Ideology’s perversion of the logic of drama, to suffer the punishment for crime. Ideology must corrupt radical innocence and if it remains obdurately untainted and innocent it will beincorporated into the processes by which Ideology creates itself – it will be slain so that it marks the altar with the footprint of death and the finger print of crime. That is the ultimatehatred that lies beyond the Ideology of religion and honour: the ideologuesthemselves must (because of their human impetrative)seek to be punished for their corruption by their corruption. What else? -- but they can never meet themselves because the spiral of theirself-confrontation and self-evasion, the hide and seek of Ideology, is endless. It is drama’s burden to unravelthese paradoxes. Indrama’s dialectics everything becomes its opposite. Only the tragic extreme of drama can show society its own reality. If you are to have a chance of knowing the culture in which you live you must understand that in the stoning in the park the baby attacks the youths. The youths are innocent.They act from the nostalgia to be human.
Theatre’s purpose is to avoid the drama ofthe reality I am describing. Instead it aims at entertainment. The most human it can become, the closest to the paradoxes of humanness, is in itsskills. These are mostly bland but some maybe knife-keen, though they can never be more than a hand-held torch in a dark jungle. I want to show how under capitalism the stoning in the park becomesentertainment. It is entertainmentfor the audience, and it would be entertainment for the young men even if it were real. Its why in the Paris rehearsalthe actors performed as primates. The audience would be outraged (though they would not yet laugh), but structurally it would be entertainment even if the actors had not imitated primates but conventional criminals. This is because capitalism does not seek humanness but profit and consumption – and humanness cannot be got at second hand. Capitalism destroys the connection between morality and the other inter-relations which create humanness. In its place itputs themechanical structures in which money propagates itself. Money is auto-parthenogenetic and parasitic on the ways of humanness. Modern theatre cannot bear the analysis of recording and enacting an event in all its structural complications and ramifications, instead it hides the event’s meaning under directors’ gimmicks and box-office gloss. Within the inter-relations of the practical drama of daily life, entertainment is the equivalent of stoning the audience. Their tragic existence is made farcical.
A Summary Note on Ideology and Drama.
Stage 1 “self”
1The youths see themselves as dehumanised.
2The youths see the baby as the incarnation of their dehumanised selves.
3The youths kill the baby to eradicate their dehumanisation.
4The killing must be a funfest for the youths because it restores their humanness.
Stage 2 “Ideology”
5Ideology maintains unjust society.
6For Ideology the youths are what the baby is for the youths.
7For Ideology the killing proves the youths are brutish.
8Ideology punishes the youths for their crime.
9Ideology is unjust and punishing the youths is its crime.
10The audience is outraged as the agent of Ideology.
Stage 3 “justice”
11Unjust society’s Ideology and institutions (its culture) prevent understanding.
12A just society would understand itself. The youths would understand what they do and have no reason to do it.
13In just society there would be residual violence. It would be unlike and does not justify the flagrant injustice of class society and its consequences
14Radical innocence is not Rousseau’s state of being born free. Radical innocence is radical. It is the innate imperative to make society just.
15There was never a Golden Age in which people were naturally good. It is equally wrong to think that Ideology and law-and-order can make society just.
16Ideology clogs culture with tension, rage, resentment. The youths did not kill the child. Society killed the child.
17Capitalism has made and will make society more unjust.
We must create enactment, which is the modern form of acting.Conventional theatre gives priority to “character” and uses what is called a “subtext.” To simplify, a character can,through the force or subtlety of her or his character, dominate events through action or insight. The subtext is usually the characters’ psychological motives, often unknown even to the characters themselves. These things are still useful. But in modern drama the situation finally takes precedence over them. The subtext is replaced by the meaning of the situation.Modern drama disentanglesthe meaning from the distortions of Ideology. Enactment does this byprising human reality from these distortions. Enactment uses the creativitythe neonate-monad used when it created its self – or, you could almost say, when the site and the situation created the self. In enactment actors may at times achieve “the invisible object,” when the actor and the audience (the first and the second brains as one) see the site and the situation (the third brain) in the way they were seen at the first creation of the self but nowmarked with the scars of ideology and burdened with the struggle for justice. The invisible object is the way radical innocence sees reality. In comparison the contrivances and gimmickry of our theatre are crude and shameful.
The abstract theory of modern drama can be illustrated by the play. The theory is immanent in the daily drama of our lives. The baby would not have been stoned if the jacket of one of the young men had not been dirtied. Already the scene is taking place in the consumer market. The park might be a shop. It is not literally a shop but the play – drama -- does not deal with the disguises of reality but with reality itself. Drama throws off the masks Ideology hides behind. The young men see the baby as helpless, inarticulate, incapable and destined for a second-class life. It is something to be “used”
unless it learns to use others and becomes part of the success of capitalism. For the young men it is an image of themselves. In its helplessness and vulnerability it should arouse their compassion. But that would be to have pity on themselves and in the capitalist world pity is a symptom of weakness. They have learnt to hate and despise themselves. So they stone the baby. It is the cultural equivalent and inevitable consequence of what orthodox economists call “creative destruction.” Why don’t they shrug and turn away? It is a question of the inter-relations within drama and society that I have described. Humanness must be destroyed. The young men’s animus provokes in them a detailed and penetrative observation of the baby and the state its in. In itself the abilityto see in this way is a gift of humanness. But in thesavage irony of their Ideologised world it is precisely thishumanness that is corrupted into inhumanness. Destroy it!